FILE: Aug. 26, 2013: Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at a joint press conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.AP

Obama, Boehner trade barbs, hints of compromise

Oracle Seal Amazing America’s Cup Win

World Bank to invest $700 mln on women, children’s health

Pope Francis tells the poor: ‘Don’t let yourselves be robbed of hope’

Heads roll after poll fiasco for Angela Merkel’s FDP allies

Pakistan Church Bombing: Death Toll Rises To 81

Egypt set for rewrite of Morsi constitution

EU and Singapore present text of comprehensive FTA

New Clashes Erupt Before Guinea Vote

Iran: We want ‘constructive engagement’

(CNN) — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani made his case Thursday to the American people and the world for “a constructive approach” to contentious issues including his nation’s nuclear program, arguing that failing to engage “leads to everyone’s loss.”

“We must work together to end the unhealthy rivalries and interferences that fuel violence and drive us apart,” Rouhani said in an op-ed published Thursday evening on the Washington Post’s website.

It’s not the first time a leader from a country often at podds with the United States has used its newspapers to convey his or her views. Just last week, for instance, Russian President Vladimir Putin argued against international military intervention in Syria and jabbed his U.S. counterpart for saying Americans should consider themselves “exceptional” — a remark that quickly elicited derision from across the U.S. political spectrum.

But Rouhani’s tone differed from Putin’s, echoing the theme of “prudence and hope” and the promise of more positive engagement with the rest of the world that helped propel him to an election win in June.

“To move beyond impasses, … we need to aim higher,” he said. “Rather than focusing on how to prevent things from getting worse, we need to think — and talk — about how to make things better.”

Contending “the age of blood feuds” and the idea of diplomacy as a “zero-sum game” no longer apply in a “changed” world, Rouhani said leaders should engage each other “on the basis of equal footing and mutual respect.”

(CNN) — The United States and Brazil jointly agreed on Tuesday to postpone Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s state visit to Washington next month due to controversy over reports the U.S. government was spying on her communications.

Brazil protested recent disclosures of National Security Agency surveillance, which were included in media reports citing information apparently leaked by Edward Snowden, a former agency contractor who previously admitted leaking U.S. surveillance information to journalists.

A White House statement announcing the postponement said President Barack Obama had previously ordered a thorough review of American intelligence activities, but it acknowledged that process would take several months to complete.

Rousseff spoke with Obama on the phone Monday in a last-minute attempt to patch things up, according to both governments. They decided for now to shelve the visit that had been scheduled for October 23.

The Minotaur V rocket that will carry NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer into space. It’s set to lift off from the space agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 11:27 p.m. ET Friday.

NASA

If the skies are clear Friday night around 11:27 p.m. ET, there’s a fair chance that anyone from as far south as South Carolina, west into Ohio and on over to New England will be able to see something of NASA’s first launch of a mission to the moon from the agency’s spaceport on Wallops Island, Va.

Our conservative calculations put the number of people who live within the“visibility map” that NASA has produced at more than 85 million. As we said Thursday, if you’re in that area this might be a night when you want to go outside and look up.

NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer mission, asSpace.com says, is carrying “a robotic mission that will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere, as well as moon dust conditions near the surface.”

Of course, light pollution, trees, buildings and cloud cover could spoil the viewing for many. Thankfully, NASA TV will be streaming its coverage.

I’m quite looking forward to Hillary Clinton being president of the United States. I think she will probably run, I think she will probably win, and I think she’ll be at least a good and maybe a great president. What I’m not particularly looking forward to is the process by which she’ll have to get there. Just in the past few days here, Maureen Dowd and Richard Cohen have laid before us in the form of two recent and silly columns little reminders of the prejudice against Clinton within a certain slice of the liberal chattering class, a prejudice that will swell predictably as she passes the various posts that stand between her and the nomination and, finally, election. Fortunately, these chatterers are less and less relevant every election. Clinton should welcome their animus. It can only help her.

Soon enough, though, the Boomer generation turned out to be no more authentic than any other—indeed quite less authentic, or at least less admirable, than the greatest generation, whom Tom Brokaw limned between hard covers the same year the world learned the name Monica Lewinsky. Though the Boomer journalists began to turn on the Clintons before the Lewinsky scandal, that really sealed it. Obviously, there were good reasons for any human being to consider what Bill Clinton did there to be unacceptable. But there was a self-regarding quality to many Boomer journalists’ scribblings (and on-air musings—the cable nets were taking off around this time) about the whole mess, as if the Clintons had somehow done this to them. Chris Matthews—oh, if you could have heard him in those days going on and on and on about the Clintons, and about Al Gore too (Matthews has even said that he voted for George W. Bush in 2000).

I served my time inside the walls of this abattoir as Hillary first sought her New York Senate seat in 1999 and 2000, a race I covered closely. My God, the hatred of Hillary one heard then! Especially among white Boomer women. At one event in early 2000, I ran into the journalist Jim Traub. We were chatting about this matter, and he said he’d spoken to a shrink friend of his who was aghast at the number of women who were plopping themselves down on his couch and—well, as Jim said to me: “Can you imagine, these women spending $165 an hour to talk about Hillary?”

That was then. Ever since, Clinton has of course served a very successful stint as a senator from New York, successful enough that when she sought reelection in 2006, the Republicans had no one of importance to run against her. (I remember well their blood vows to make sure she was a one-termer.) She then became the secretary of State, and an excellent one, forging major diplomatic breakthroughs with Russia (since rescinded by Putin, not her fault) and other triumphs like the Libya coalition. In between, she ran a not-very-good presidential campaign, it is true. But there’s very little room to doubt the proposition that someone who has been both a senator and a secretary of State, and has to boot lived in the White House for eight years and seen daily what it’s like to have that job, is amply prepared to be the president, and is not remotely the same person she was in 1999.

The world has moved on from those tremulous Boomer anxieties. Well, most of the world has. But Dowd and Cohen are here to remind us that the knives will once again be unsheathed. Dowd’s column was notable only for the fact that she found the flimsiest pretense possible for printing the name Gennifer Flowers, and Cohen is in a lather because Clinton doesn’t have a message yet (of course, if she did, he’d be writing about how having one so early openly showed Clinton’s breathtaking chutzpah). Of Matthews, though, we must say that he has moved on: he has understood, to his great credit, from very early on how lunatic and dangerous today’s Republican Party has become, and he’s changed his tune accordingly.

Matthews’s change is important. Back in the 1990s, there seemed to many people to be little truly at stake in our politics. The Cold War was won. The parties disagreed, of course, and money was rotting the system, yes. But the corrosive effects of both polarization and legal corruption were nothing compared to today. And one of our two major parties hadn’t yet lost its collective mind. This was the historical era when many center-liberals decided it was cooler to bash liberalism than conservatism—when Slate was born, for example, specializing as it did (and still does a bit, but not nearly as much) in producing the “counter-intuitive” “liberal” take on something like why Charles Murray might be right about IQ after all.

That era is pretty close to dead, thankfully. But in a certain kind of pundit, Hillary Clinton will always inspire the same kind of reaction she did two decades ago. It will make for tedious reading, but it will end up helping Clinton, this superficial japery, because the rest of the country understands that the stakes are too high now, and any journalism that doesn’t sink its teeth into that problem will just look silly. And the curse of the Boomer psychodrama about the Clintons will be canceled for lack of interest.

The CEO who caught the Chinese spies red-handed

The exclusive inside look at why Kevin Mandia revealed that the People’s Liberation Army has systematically hacked U.S. companies. By Nina Easton

Obamas head to SA

James Gandolfini funeral live coverage Live

Tune in for reports from the funeral service for “Sopranos” actor James Gandolfini, happening now at St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights.

San Francisco Drops Law Mandating Radiation Warning Labels on Cell Phones

Judge Blocks Cell Phone Safety Warnings in San Francisco

Three women were rescued Monday afternoon from a home in Cleveland. Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight all went missing roughly 10 years ago, when Berry was 16, DeJesus 14 and Knight was 21. All three are alive, talking, and apparently in good health, according to police.

If you need to find your loved ones:

617-635-4500

If you have information that leads to suspects in this case:

1-800-494-TIPS

ABORTION SHOWDOWN LOOMS

APOCALYPSE… NOW
U.S. Cutting Spending Like It’s Ending The Vietnam War

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RAVENS!… 49ers COMEBACK FALLS SHORT… GOAL-LINE STAND IN FINAL MINUTES…